Marcus Fairs – Dezeenhttps://www.dezeen.com
architecture and design magazineSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Design "enhances our economy and our global reputation" says UK culture ministerhttps://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/09/design-enhances-economy-reputation-matt-hancock-digital-culture-minister-brexit-uk/
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/09/design-enhances-economy-reputation-matt-hancock-digital-culture-minister-brexit-uk/#respondFri, 09 Dec 2016 10:22:46 +0000https://admin.dezeen.com/?p=1018996UK culture minister Matt Hancock has praised the UK's architects and designers, describing the sector as "vitally important to our future as an outward looking, creative nation". The comments – the first in which the new minister has specifically highlighted the UK's design sector – came after a dinner hosted by Dezeen and held at Second Home in

The dinner followed the publication of Dezeen's Brexit Design Manifesto, which identified ways the design sector can help the UK maintain its vibrancy after Brexit, and listed areas of concern for the sector.

Issues discussed at the dinner included: the importance of being able to hire talented overseas workers; the need for a world-class education system to educate the design leaders of the future; the need for ongoing access to international IP regimes; and the vital role design can play to make UK manufacturers more innovative and competitive.

Other topics covered included the need to address perceptions that design is an elitist, metropolitan profession, and how to find ways to show that design can improve businesses and lives around the country.

Ideas discussed included ways that design companies and institutions could reach out more to the regions and to schools, and the need for the sector to improve the way it interacts with government and speak with a unified voice.

Hancock said it was important to find ways to help the sector continue to flourish after Brexit, adding that he will continue to work with the industry as the government conducts Brexit negotiations.

But he said the sector needed to do more to ensure the entire country understood design and enjoyed the benefits that design can bring.

Hancock, who was elected Conservative MP for West Suffolk in 2010, was appointed minister of state responsible for digital and culture policy in July this year.

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/09/design-enhances-economy-reputation-matt-hancock-digital-culture-minister-brexit-uk/feed/0Dezeen is officially the world's most popular online design magazinehttps://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/08/dezeen-officially-worlds-most-popular-design-magazine-alexa-rankings/
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/08/dezeen-officially-worlds-most-popular-design-magazine-alexa-rankings/#respondThu, 08 Dec 2016 11:55:42 +0000https://admin.dezeen.com/?p=1018453Dezeen is now the most popular online design magazine in the world, according to statistics from web data firm Alexa. The latest Alexa rankings place Dezeen among the 7,500 most popular websites on the planet, ahead of all other contemporary design websites. Dezeen is ranked at 7,084, having climbed several thousand places over the last year, while

]]>Architects and developers working in Miami are belatedly responding to climate change, amid a growing sense of alarm over how rising sea levels are affecting the city.

Design Miami chief creative officer Rodman Primack told Dezeen that climate change is "actually happening" in Miami while Vanity Fair's architecture critic Paul Goldberger said rising sea levels are affecting the Florida city "more than any place else in the United States".

"A lot of people have been trying to hide their heads in the sand and that sand is actually eroding," Primack told Dezeen, referring to the fact that sand on Miami Beach needs regular topping up, as the sea keeps washing it away.

"We're beginning to realise that that stance is not sustainable. Miami is not theoretically looking at ocean rise; it's actually happening."

"Our neighbourhoods flood," he added. "We have real, visible and tangible impacts of sea-level rise right now and I think we're finally beginning to hear architects and developers thinking about how they're going to develop for a much longer horizon."

Much of this area is only a metre or less above sea level and flooding is an increasingly regular fact of life. However many buildings have little in the way of defences.

Now there are signs that developers and architects are finally taking climate change seriously and making their buildings resilient to rising waters.

Jean Nouvel's Monad Terrace is the first building to be constructed in line with new city building codes

Last week French architect Jean Nouvel unveiled Monad Terrace, a waterfront apartment block that is the first to be built in line with new city building codes that call for new projects to be raised above the ground.

"It is our first project in Miami, in South Miami Beach on the Lagoon, and we had of course questions about the level of water and about flooding," said Nouvel, speaking with Goldberger at the Design Miami fair.

"The city decided to place buildings six or seven feet above the actual ground and we were the first building to follow this new policy," he said. "But we took the decision to add six feet more. So we also put the car park above the level of the ground. So if there is a flood, like you have once in a century, the water will arrive in the car park."

One of few other buildings to have taken flooding this seriously is Herzog & de Meuron's waterfront Pérez Art Museum Miami. Opened in 2013, the museum is built on stilts three metres above ground, allowing a storm surge to pass underneath. At the time the architects said they hoped the building, which also features generous, shaded outdoor areas and lush planting, could act as a new "vernacular for Miami".

However, according to Primack, the intelligence of this approach was lost on most people.

"Perez was looking forward in a really smart way; having the parking underneath and the building floating above the sea," he said. "But I don't think that's been a big talking point about the building, and it should be."

Change should come from government say architects and developers

Elsewhere, raising the ground level is set to become the new norm in Miami. Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld is converting legendary Miami Beach hotel The Shore Club into a luxury complex called Fasano Hotel + Residences, which will involve raising a pool and gardens six or seven feet above the beach.

However there is also a sense of resignation that not much can be done to resist the rising ocean.

"In the last century there was a government that organised the building of dams, of highways and that would have presumably noticed that some part of the territory was in jeopardy,' he said. "But that is doesn't seem to be there any more."

Koolhaas admitted that the topic was one of the few issues he felt powerless to address. "It's been kind of really exciting for me to kind of finally not so much do something about sustainability, but to actually be incapable of speculating about some of the likely and some of the already visible affects."

Attitude change needed fast

Rodman Primack said that until recently, people had been frightened to even discuss the issue.

"I think there's fear in actually acknowledging it," he said. "But we've gotten to a place where that can't happen any more, where we can't say that it's some weird anomaly. It's happening. You can see in the city of Miami, towards the bay, they have raised the streets four feet because they were all flooding."

Primack said that real-estate developers needed to change their attitude and come up with ways of turning flood readiness into a selling point.

"Sadly so much of everything is figuring out a marketing angle that gets people excited so developers have got to find a way of addressing this and making it a cool thing."

Ultimately, Miami needs to pioneer ways to deal with a problem that is going to affect more and more cities around the world, he added.

"We have to get on top of it and think about it in an intelligent way," he said, saying Miami should become a role model for other cities. "Let's build the city of the future on the ocean. Most of the major cities in the world are on water."

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/06/miami-architecture-addresses-alarm-rising-sea-level-climate-change-usa/feed/0UK designers could still qualify for European patents and Erasmus exchanges after Brexithttps://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/06/uk-designers-could-still-qualify-european-patents-erasmus-exchanges-after-brexit/
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/06/uk-designers-could-still-qualify-european-patents-erasmus-exchanges-after-brexit/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 12:20:33 +0000https://admin.dezeen.com/?p=1016906Brexit: UK design firms might still be able to protect their ideas in Europe's new patent system after Brexit, while students could continue to participate in the Erasmus student exchange programme, it has emerged. The UK government announced last week that it would ratify a Europe-wide agreement to unify patents across 25 EU states, meaning designers will be

]]>Brexit: UK design firms might still be able to protect their ideas in Europe's new patent system after Brexit, while students could continue to participate in the Erasmus student exchange programme, it has emerged.

The UK government announced last week that it would ratify a Europe-wide agreement to unify patents across 25 EU states, meaning designers will be able to register and protect their ideas in one place instead of seeking patents for each country.

Moving ahead with the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court (UPCA) "will make it easier for British businesses to protect their ideas and inventions from being illegally copied by companies in other countries," the government said.

Mark Corran of intellectual property law firms Briffa described the news as "surprising" and added that "this could well be simply a negotiating tactic in the Brexit discussions".

He added: "It’s possible that the UK will still be involved in the patent systems but in what form is not yet clear and will likely be determined as part of the wider Brexit negotiations."

Meanwhile Boris Johnson, the UK foreign secretary, has suggested that the country could continue to pay to participate in the Erasmus scheme, allowing exchanges between British and European schools even after the UK leaves the EU.

Referring to Erasmus and the Horizon research programme on BBC TV's The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Johnson said: "I've always thought that there were aspects of EU cooperation where actually, to be part of that in the future, might be a good idea, certainly would be a good idea if it involved paying in."

Continued access to pan-European design protection, student exchanges and research programmes were key elements of Dezeen's Brexit Design Manifesto.

Published in September and signed by hundreds of leading individuals and businesses, the manifesto called for student exchange programmes and research links to be be retained and demanded reassurance that UK designers "will be able to get international protection for their ideas with a minimum of cost and bureaucracy".

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/06/uk-designers-could-still-qualify-european-patents-erasmus-exchanges-after-brexit/feed/0"I was not completely surprised when Trump won" says Rem Koolhaashttps://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/05/rem-koolhaas-donald-trump-usa-presidental-election-not-surprised/
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/05/rem-koolhaas-donald-trump-usa-presidental-election-not-surprised/#respondMon, 05 Dec 2016 18:08:58 +0000https://admin.dezeen.com/?p=1016950An obsession with cities has masked profound changes in rural America that helped Donald Trump sweep to victory in the US presidential election, according to architect Rem Koolhaas. "I'm not saying that Trump was inevitable but the scale of upheaval in the centre of America made it very understandable for me that something else was going to happen," the founder

]]>An obsession with cities has masked profound changes in rural America that helped Donald Trump sweep to victory in the US presidential election, according to architect Rem Koolhaas.

"I'm not saying that Trump was inevitable but the scale of upheaval in the centre of America made it very understandable for me that something else was going to happen," the founder of OMA told Dezeen.

"I was not completely surprised when Trump won."

The Dutch architect also attacked the "complacency" of Silicon Valley firms, who have for years preached the benefits of disruption.

"For me, one of the very good things about Trump [winning] is that it really discredits the whole Silicon Valley complacency, language and culture," he said, speaking exclusively to Dezeen in Miami last week.

"Every single Silicon Valley company contributed to making 'disrupt' a fashionable word, and they are now moaning about the disruption of this election."

Google and Facebook have recently been blamed for helping the spread of "fake news" that some believe helped sway the result of the presidential election.

Koolhaas said that changes taking place in the countryside are now more profound than those in urban areas, but that nobody has noticed.

"In the last 10-15 years we have almost exclusively looked at cities," he said, pointing out that since publication of statistics showing that more than 50 per cent of humanity now lives in cities, "90 or even 99 percent" of intellectual activity is focused on urban issues.

"If you look at all the analysis, all the books, all the vast majority are about the city," he said.

"This focus has made us blind to what is happening in the countryside," he added. "I really believe that transformation is more radical and also more essential to understand."

Mega-architecture and robots are transforming the countryside

Dramatic changes taking place outside cities include the robotisation of both agricultural and industrial production, which is reducing the need for human labour.

"Agriculture in America is more and more concentrated on a central belt that runs from the south to the north," said Koolhaas. "And there is a kind of seasonal operation where larger and larger machines that are used for harvesting are so big that no individual farmer can actually own one. They become like armada of machinery that that is so expensive that it has to function 24 hours a day."

"That is concentrating a large percentage of all the production in America in a central zone. So it is in our view no so coincidence that that is where the Trump voters were voting."

On top of this, a new form of mega-architecture is starting to creep into the countryside to house the server farms, distribution warehouses and factories that require almost no human labour and which are too big to fit in cities, he explained.

"What we have discovered in America is an enormous impact of Silicon Valley in terms of how its infrastructure reaches a scale which simply cannot be fitted into cities any more so it has to be fitted to the countryside," said the architect.

"For instance in Nevada there is now huge concentrations of server farms, fulfilment centres, battery factories and all of that is reaching the scale of a city but it will never have the density of the city."

"So I have the sense that there is new condition emerging which is probably highly automated, highly robotised entities that are supporting this digital revolution, that requires fewer and fewer people. So I think that that in itself very interesting architectural typology which we haven't seen so far."

"This is leading to new types of architecture that are designed for robots rather than humans," he continued.

"The issue of automation clearly already has an enormous impact. In architecture there's simply no awareness that in the near future we may have to plan buildings for machines rather than for human beings. I don't know what that could be, because for machines you don't need handicapped access, you can be harsh. It will have an effect on everything."

Koolhaas gave the example of Amazon warehouses, which are getting bigger and bigger but require fewer and fewer workers. "You probably have no idea of the number, the scale, the constantly increasing scale," he said. "And also how they are not so much looking for cheaper workers but actually becoming institutions without workers."

During the election, Trump made much of the fact that American factory jobs were being lost to overseas competitors, promising to end free-trade deals that made this possible.